Tidy Deployment - to Dock or Not to Dock?
The Docking Station is an amazingly useful accessory, but is it always the best approach. Problem with the Dock I installed a new TV in my bedroom, and wall-mounted it with the idea of having a clean install with no external cables. The Measy dock is extremely useful but it turns your setup into an ugly mess of HDMI cable, Dock and Measy device, power cable, and USB device all hanging down. This is not really suitable for a wall-mount scenario, so what can you do to still have a useful Measy device without the dock? Without the Dock I have the aesthetic ideal - Measy device is almost hidden behind my TV, no cables hanging down at all, and the wireless antenna is still powerful enough to pick up my home router on the other side of the house. How to Live Without the Docking Station For power I just use the USB port on my Samsung TV - even though this is just a service port (no media at all, it's an older TV) it powers the Measy device just fine. So every time I turn my TV on, my Measy device automatically turns on. And when I turn TV off Measy goes off, so I don't need to bother remembering to do it, very easy. The problem without the dock is that you have only 1 USB port, so you can either have USB storage or a USB remote control but not both. And without a USB remote you can't do anything. I took a 2-step journey to work around this: 1) First I figured I could use the "Tablet Remote" App in place of my USB remote. Install this on your Measy device and any other Android device, and then you can use the other Android device to control your Measy device over Wifi or Bluetooth - great! There are real problems with this approach though, as follows: i) The Tablet Remote app is pretty limited in what you can do, and particularly with video play you can sometimes find yourself in an impossible spot where you need to switch back to the USB remote. ii) The Tablet Remote app requires manual intervention on the Measy device to make it work, so unless you're very clever and manage to figure out how to script this in your startup using INIT.D, you'll need to first connect your USB remote, then use that to connect Tablet Remote, and only then can you unplug your USB remote and replace it with USB storage (which you can use the Tablet Remote to watch). This becomes a bit of a pain in the butt when you're already having to run TUN.KO and VPN at start up to watch Internet TV... we really want to reduce the startup steps as much as possible, to get an easier user experience. 2) Then I realised that instead of replacing the USB remote, what I need to do is replace the USB Storage. And Measy has actually made this really easy for us! So first step on this journey was to realise that my generic VDSL router provided by my ISP had a USB port on the back of it, which I could enable for DLNA on my router. DLNA is the boss! If you can't do this on your home router find some DLNA enabled wifi device that you can use instead, because this becomes your central wifi media hub that can then stream out to every other wifi device in the house (tablets, phones etc. all seem to get it). Next step was to find an App for the Measy device that was DLNA friendly, I had been playing with XBMC already so tried that out with limited success but poor performance. Then eventually I realised the Media Streaming / Player App that Measy gives you out of the box, and appears to be almost useless - is actually totally perfect for playing DLNA streamed media. The movies from the USB stick plugged into my router just automatically show up on this App, and they play beautifully and as smoothly as if they were plugged in directly to the Measy device rather than streamed over Wifi. So now I have the best of both worlds - a tidy deployment with no cables hanging down at all, not using the Measy Docking Station, but still having full access to local USB media (streamed over DLNA across the house), can watch all Internet TV stations, and I have full use of the USB remote control. For this deployment scenario (i.e. not wanting cables and other tech stuff messing up the room), the Docking Station probably becomes not even really a necessary purchase - although it is so useful for other purposes that may come up, I would probably suggest you buy it regardless. I haven't of course touched on other issues here, but for the person buying this Measy device simply for USB media, normal Apps, and Internet TV - this approach is the most simple and tidy and easy and definitely a winner in my books. An issue with this I haven't mentioned though is difficulty in using the inbuilt camera in this scenario, as plugged directly into an HDMI port it would normally not be in an ideal position in terms of camera placement. Personally this doesn't bother me much as the camera is crap and I have plenty of tablets in the house I can use for Skype etc. with much better inbuilt cameras. The perfect scenario though would be if we could use a standard USB camera (usually Logitech) instead of the inbuilt one. This would allow the USB cam to be mounted on the TV and still avoid having cables hanging down, although we'd again run into an issue with only 1 USB port and 2 devices required (USB remote and camera). So far to date though I don't think any Android App exists that can replace your Skype camera of choice with USB cam instead of the inbuilt one - this is a restriction of the Skype App itself, as much as anything else. The other part of this problem is that Android drivers just haven't been written by Logitech etc. (short sightedness much?). There is an App on Google Play that will allow you to use Logitech USB cameras, but this is in a standalone fashion only - i.e. you can't use the camera with any other Apps. There are possible ways around this though (do a little research and you'll see the obstacles are not overwhelming, just require a lot of dedication), and I'd love to see someone (ideally Logitech) doing something to help out '''all Android users '''here. This is not just an issue with Measy devices, no Android devices at all can make good use of USB cameras so far.